Working on a new story (and cover art!)

Wow, it's been a long time without an update here, huh? I have been working on writing, though! During a crazy few months (psst: I'm a married elf-girl now!), I've been jotting down ideas for my story. October was spent teaching myself tarot and doing research on things from seabirds to blindness (although in hindsight, I also needed to learn about horses, wagons, and boats too).

And November? Time for NaNoWriMo! I decided to try National Novel Writing Month for the first time ever and as of early on day 5, I'm at almost 7k words and am finally hitting some Plot. This is my longest writing challenge yet since Hidden Magic and The Acoylte's Map got me around 22k and 23k respectively over the course of about three months; now I'm trying for 50k in one month. Fingers crossed I can do that!

Since I'm an artist and need to always be making things with my hands (seriously, it's like some sort of a curse of constant activity), I decided that I wanted to make objects that are important to the characters in my story. This week I made the first: a green tarot bag like the one Clover, my halfling prophetess, carries. I finally figured out a title this week, too (yay! I stink at titles; previous stories had been "Meren's Story" and "Raff's Story" until they were finished and I bummed names off family and friends) so now that I had that and a tarot set similar to Clover's, I made a cover for my story yesterday:

Tarot plays an important roll so that was what I decided on for the cover. I may make a new one later, once I make the objects owned by all the protagonists, and have those with the tarot cards. (And there's a reason for the picked cards being a set of Knights; that wasn't picked arbitrarily!)

Here's a better view of the pouch. I'm so glad I had this shamrock fabric in my art supplies stash since it works great for someone named "Clover"!

This story is going to need a lot of editing once it's done (I've never written without obsessive amounts of editing at the same time before, but those are the rules!), but eventually I'll share it here. :)

~Meri